Llŷn Alpacas

Welcome to Llŷn Alpacas.

We run a small holding on the beautiful Llŷn peninsular and have been breeding alpacas since 2010.

Our alpacas originally started out as a small herd of three pregnant females, Pearl, Cocoa and Annabel, from 'Laurel Farm' in Devon.
They had three beautiful babies in 2010, two boys and a girl, Monty, Molly and Merlin.
A few weeks after the girls arrived we were offered two more alpacas, Murphy and Zac. So by the end of 2010, we had eight alpacas!
The herd had grown quicker than we expected.
Now we had to make a decision, do we keep it at eight or do we expand. We didn't really have room to take on many more, so we settled at that,
However in 2011, we got the chance to purchase land adjacent to ours. We needed more lawn mowers! So we decided to get our own stud, rather than take the girls elsewhere.

Along came Prince in November 2011. The stud boy! Alpacas are induced ovulators and are pregnant for about 11 and half months, so we waited for the spring to put him to the test.

We mated all four girls Spring 2012. We had a fifty percent success rate and Molly and Cocoa gave birth to females in the summer of 2013, Agatha and Amber. For more up to date information on the alpacas and anything else going on round the smallholding, you might like to read the blog.

Our aim is to breed happy, healthy alpacas. Whilst we are trying to breed alpacas with good quality fleece our primary concern is the animal's temperament and health, therefore we get to know our alpacas individually.

The alpacas are sheared once a year and between them produce quite a bit of fibre. This meant I had to find a way of using the fibre. Fortunately, I was given a spinning wheel and have since learnt to spin, primarily through trial and error but I also went on a course after a year to improve my spinning. I have also learnt how to clean and process the fibre ready for spinning. The fibre is now sold in it's various stages from a small studio on the smallholding.